“Artist” Jeff Koons Scams $8 Million for Coloring Book #4

"Artist" Jeff Koons (left) and Owner of the Sacramento Kings, 

Who Will Go Unnamed to Save Him Further Embarrassment

The latest Jeff Koons (born 1955) assault on public taste and mores just arrived in sunny Sacramento, CA.  And in doing so, he made a cool $8 million.  Nice work if you can get it.

The sculpture, Coloring Book #4, was just set into place outside the Golden 1 Center, standing on a pedestal near what will be the main entrance of the arena’s northwest corner. 

Coloring Book #4 is 18 feet tall, and is part of his Coloring Book collection, a series the artist said was inspired by the (hardly Renaissance-worthy) notion of a child coloring out of the lines of an image of Piglet.

Just take a moment to let both the money involved and the inspiration to sink in.  Good?  Let’s proceed.

As the huckster artist explained to The Sacramento Bee in 2015: I hope that a piece like Coloring Book can excite young children who are going hand-in-hand with their mother and father and with their sisters and grandparents to a sporting event (at the arena), that all generations can find some contemplative interaction with the piece.

Or something.

Most of this latest attack on public taste was funded by the Sacramento Kings; the city of Sacramento also threw away $2.5 million for its share of the public financing of the Golden 1 Center.  (This money came from the Art in Public Places program, which clearly has a very loose definition of both “art” and “public places.”)

I must make it clear that my disgust with this has little to do with city fathers spending $8 million on art.  Actually, I think city, state and federal governments should increase arts spending, not cut them.  Art spending increases, say I!

What I find so clearly offensive is spending money on bad art, or worse still, non-art.  Think, for a moment, about “public art projects” (for want of a better term) of earlier times, and compare them to the rubbish pushed down our throats today.  Where are projects with the sobriety, seriousness and artistic virtuosity of the Jefferson Memorial, the Tower of Pisa, Notre Dame … good heaves, we could even make a case for Mount Rushmore… 

But we do not create public work like this, mainly thanks to Modernity’s flight from beauty, the decadent and debased language of contemporary art criticism, and the sick influence of money by uneducated, tasteless collectors.

Let’s look at this $8 million piece of “art.”  It says … nothing.  It is a towering, misshapen mess, made of reflective material that mirrors its surroundings, but does not comment or improve upon them.  Even for the sake of argument, Piglet is invisible (for those Pooh fans hoping to salvage something from this debacle); and the contours and colors have no power of suggestion or reference.

Had Koons spent $1.95 on a bellows to blow color-tinted bubbles, the result would be much the same.  Here is a work without intelligence, without virtuosity, and without any internal coherence.  Simple human ethics should shame him out of the field of artistic endeavor, and make his name a byword for chicanery, hucksterism and bad taste.

Our feelings about Koons are best summarized by the late, great art critic and humanist Robert Hughes (1938-2012), who wrote (about including Koons in a new program on art): Jeff Koons [is included]: not because his work is beautiful or means anything much, but because it is such an extreme and self-satisfied manifestation of the sanctimony that attaches to big bucks. Koons really does think he's Michelangelo and is not shy to say so. The significant thing is that there are collectors, especially in America, who believe it. He has the slimy assurance, the gross patter about transcendence through art, of a blow-dried Baptist selling swamp acres in Florida. And the result is that you can't imagine America's singularly depraved culture without him. He fits into Bush's America the way Warhol fitted into Reagan's. There may be worse things waiting in the wings (never forget that morose observation of Milton's on the topography of Hell: "And in the lowest depth, a lower depth") but for the moment they aren't apparent, which isn't to say that they won't crawl, glistening like Paris Hilton's lip-gloss, out of some gallery next month. Koons is the perfect product of an art system in which the market controls nearly everything, including much of what gets said about art.

The United States is filled with artists, great artists, doing great work.  Work that really is about transcendence, connecting us with the sublime, and fostering the better parts of our basic humanity.  Why do we reward the Jeff Koons of this world, and not them?  When will art replace hucksterism, and when will the public rise in a body and reject this junk?

We have recently arrived on the West Coast, having left a New York where countless people spend a significant amount of time urinating on public art.  It may be the most base and unhygienic mode of criticism I have come across, but they were doing they best they could.  And looking at Koons’ latest ‘masterwork,’ the memory brought a warm, yellow glow.

The Execution of Lady Jane Grey by Paul Delaroche (1834)

Gad, I love this picture; behold the wonders of 19^th Century Academic Art in all its glory.  Be warned, though: the current art establishment believes The Execution of Lady Jane Grey to be little better than kitsch, and admiration for Delaroche’s technical virtuosity, theatrical sense and incomparable draftsmanship a sign of antiqued and louche taste. 

Paul Delaroche’s (1797-1857) remarkable drawing and sense of composition, the picture’s almost licked finish, and its sense of history tinged with Romanticism is everything that Modernism has rejected.  Delaroche, in fact, was too brilliant too late.  The very earliest proponents of Modernism began to disdain his achievement – Van Gogh called Delaroche one of the “very bad history painters” and affected to hate his work.  If we make a riposte to Van Gough through the mists of time, we must make sure to address his good ear…

The Execution of Lady Jane Grey was bequeathed to the Tate Gallery in the early 20^th Century, and had been banished to storage by 1928.  In 1974, the picture was resurrected for show at the National Gallery.  And there, something quite remarkable happened.  The public, neither interested in, nor gulled by, mainstream art historians discovered the picture and lined up to see it.  Delaroche’s work has proven so popular that the wooden floor before it must be polished far more often than other spots in the gallery.

And no wonder.  Look at everything that Delaroche does in this picture.  There are only five life-size figures, and they are superbly and dramatically placed within the frame.   Lady Jane Grey was the great-grand-daughter of Henry VII, and, at 17, she was named successor to the throne of England by her cousin, Edward VI.  The plan, at least, was that the crowning of Protestant Jane would shore up Protestantism and keep Catholic influence at bay.  However, her claim on the crown was too weak, and she reigned for a scant nine days, after which she was deposed and executed for treason by the rightful monarch, Edward’s half-sister, Mary Tudor.  Delaroche sets his scene in the Tower of London on the morning of the execution, February 12, 1554. 

The girl (little more than a child) is behaving with magnificent poise, which makes the emotional scene more poignant.  She is on the scaffold and dressed only her undergarments.  Her clothes are piled beside her lady-in-waiting, who has collapsed in grief against the left wall.  Her other handmaiden faces the wall, the horror to come too much to bear. 

Grey, blindfolded, reaches out for the chopping block where, moments later, her head will be cleaved from her body.  Sir John Brydges, the lieutenant of the Tower, gently guides her to her death; his heart-breaking solicitude increases the emotional pitch of the picture.  Even the executioner directs his gaze away, awed by the enormity of the sin he is about to commit.  Look at how he shifts his weight to one leg, his right hand almost releasing the axe.  Delaroche manages to depict different emotional reactions from the players of this tragedy, inspiring a multitude of emotional responses from us, the viewer. 

Preparatory Drawing By Delaroche 

If yesterday’s picture, The Children of Edward, fills us with melancholy, Jane Grey is deeply, wrenchingly, viscerally moving.

Wisely, Delaroche keeps the representation of their surroundings to minimal gray-tones and subtle stone carvings.  The bare stage, if you will, maintains focus on the figures and the deeply human connection is never lost.  The one non-human touch of any significance is the straw surrounding the block; this, if nothing else, underscores the horror to come when we realize that it is there to soak up the young girl’s blood.

If we wonder how or why Delaroche was able to connect so viscerally with this particular historical incident, it would do well to remember that only a scant 40 years earlier, Delaroche’s countrymen cut off the heads of their own aristocracy.

By any cultural yardstick, this is a magnificent and moving painting.   

More Delaroche tomorrow.

Jacob Collins at the Dahesh

This season’s batch of Salon Thursday lectures, created and hosted with customary aplomb by the Dahesh, continued on a high note last night when Jacob Collins -- New York City artist, teacher, and founder of the Grand Central Academy – came to discuss the foundation of his contemporary art school, patterned on the model of the 19th-century atelier. 

My long-standing admiration for Collins as an artist, an arts activist and a teacher is without bounds.  He has been at the forefront of a strong, pervasive and ever-growing movement to correct the course that art (and art history) has taken after its disastrous, dehumanizing collision with Modernism.  For Collins (like your correspondent and millions of others in an invisible majority), the break from the Academy was not an explosion of new freedoms, but an invitation to hollow, ridiculous and often offensive amateurism and self-indulgence. 

Aside from the beauty of his work, Collins also joins such diverse figures as Graydon Parrish, Ted Seth Jacobs, Anthony Ryder and Ephraim Rubenstein as an important teacher to new generations of artists who aspire to virtuosity.

Collins spoke to a packed house last night (April 3), in a relaxed and conversational forum.  After telling us about himself and his mission to rescue art from Modernist muddle-headedness, he opened the floor for questions, charming the crowd for more than an hour.  Any man who says, unashamedly, I love stuffy, old fashioned humanism.  Many have argued that the world that I’m in is lonely, but the rest of the world that I am fleeing is moving so quickly that I cannot apprehend it is a kindred spirit to these pages.

Though not explicitly stated as such last night, what Collins is seeking is a return to a Renaissance Ideal; another Age of Enlightenment.  Modernism has robbed art of its human element, and the fundamental connection between great art and great emotion has been lost in a morass of irony, ‘theory’ and hucksterism.

As Collins said during his opening: What got me here?  As a kid in the 1960s, 70s and 80s, I grew up in a time from which I felt distanced.  Something gave me a sense of loss.  I recognized that something was missing when I looked at the work of the great Renaissance masters through the 19^th Century, which is really the Renaissance arc.

I was outraged in my youthful way by its absence, by a lack of continuity.  What happened, I wondered?  Why can’t we have that art?  And why am I discouraged by teachers and experts rom pursing that ideal in my own studies?

Of course, Collins realizes that an engagement with the past does not mean living in the past.  As he said, the problem with that is that it’s reactionary.  But there is clearly something wrong with the 20^th Century.  And that there is some cultural suppression of the humanist impulse is fairly obvious.  I’m at a point where fixing something that is wrong is a big part of my life.  That, and I want to make beautiful art.

One would think making beautiful art was part of the agenda for any art student, or any art school.  But Collins did not find that to be the case.  First, I had to learn how to draw and paint decently.  That was very hard.  Years later, I started an atelier because I kept bumping into people who wanted to do this – become part of the artistic tradition – under a coherent structure.  When I was a kid, I wanted to fix things and make them look good.  And that, in a way, is what I’m doing with the Academic Tradition.  My great ambition was to be a marvelous artist; not by contemporary standards, which I thought were false and ugly, but by the high standards of the 19^th Century.

I thought we would change the culture, which was a charming fantasy.  My goal isn’t to step into some throne of art culture, but to open up space for artists working in this tradition.  And that is slowly happening.  This culture and ideas and philosophy is more advanced than it was 20 years ago.  What is missing is the patronage, a way of having some kind of nexus with the culture.

Collins is acutely aware that the very language of the current art establishment is against him.  He says, This revival of interest seems natural in that reconnecting to drawing and painting is natural.  There is today an “institutional avant-garde,” to use a contradiction in terms, but there it is.  There is a deep, false, association of art with the notion that, as progressive politics are morally good, and regressive politics are morally bad, regressive art is bad.  It’s a cultural value that’s universally accepted – ergo, progressive art is morally good and regressive art is morally bad.

If you want to bring back that art, the argument goes, you are bringing back the culture that went with it.  If you want to go back to that type of art, then you want to go back to a culture that preceeds progressive politics … but I think that is a specious argument.  It should be, instead, couched in terms of Modernism vs. Humanism.  But Post Modernist thought rejects that because it bound to its own irony. 

The context and the language of art – so many people have created a language of art that has, built into it, a value system that is antithetical to this art.  You need to have a new language to discuss it.

How we have gotten to this impasse is also a topic that animates the artist:  The phenomenon of the last 100-150 years is unusual.  It’s like the Renaissance in reverse.  There was a “scrap that” attitude of the 20^th Century that is almost historically without precedent.  That has led to a fragmented art world.  My hope is that some patronage would evolve to support these artists and this type of art.

The question of why it happened – I’ve spent my life thinking about it.  There is a sort of taboo for people who advocate on behalf of pre-Modernist art… but, part of me feels that’s just too bad.  All I want is to collect around me people who are interested in this.  It’s a different world.  As I say, if you want to play the piccolo, and connect with people who like it, don’t spend time in heavy metal concerts.

It was an extraordinary evening with an extraordinary man: gifted artist, philosopher, and activist.  Kudos, as always, to the Dahesh for providing an ongoing forum for art scholarship and outreach.

One last brief word about The Grand Central Academy of Art.  This is the school founded by Jacob Collins, located in mid-town Manhattan.  To quote their Web site, The Grand Central Academy of Art … is built on the skills and ideas that have come from the classical world, the Italian Renaissance and through to the Beaux-Art tradition of the nineteenth century.   The Academy is a center for the revival of the classical tradition where a new generation of artists is supported in the pursuit of skill and beauty.  Interested readers can learn more at: http://grandcentralacademy.classicist.org/index.html.

The Magnificent Ambersons, by Booth Tarkington

Not many people read Booth Tarkington (1869-1946) these days, and that is a great shame.  Tarkington was, at one time, one of the nation’s most popular writers, and he was known for the gentle lyricism of his prose as well as the faintly wistful and nostalgic tone of his worldview.

Tarkington is only one of three novelists (the others being William Faulkner and John Updike) who won the Pulitzer Prize for literature more than once.  He won the prize, most significantly, for what has now become his most famous novel, The Magnificent Ambersons (1918; won the Pulitzer in 1919).

Many would argue that it is his nostalgia for a vanished America that has hurt Tarkington’s cultural currency, but I doubt that.  No, I believe that Tarkington’s literary reputation was glossed over because he saw both the positives and negatives of the encroaching Modern World, and was very clear-eyed in his assessment of it.

This came to me quite distinctly while recently rereading Ambersons.  It is the second novel in his Growth trilogy, which included the now-forgotten The Turmoil (1915) and The Midlander (1923; retitled National Avenue in 1927).  Ambersons was famously made into a film by Orson Welles in 1942, but the film, fine as it is, was but a pale reflection of the novel.

The novel tells the story of George Amberson Minafer.  He is born into the wealthy and socially-connected Amberson family and is, for want of a better term, a spoiled brat.  Shallow, snobbish, uninterested (and uninteresting), his bad-boy behavior has a certain energy and dash, but he is a thoroughly selfish and wretched human being.

George behaves as a young prince in his Midwestern town, and, for all practical purposes, he is.  When Eugene Morgan, who courted his mother, Isabel, back in the day, returns to town, George meets and falls in love with Morgan’s daughter, Lucy.  When George’s father dies, it seems as if Morgan and Isabel will finally reunite; however, George’s selfishness and high-handed behavior ruins their chance of happiness.

When George leaves with his mother for Europe, the Amberson fortune slowly crumbles while Morgan, who makes automobiles, grows richer and richer.  George and Isabel return to the town, where Isabel dies.  When his grandfather dies almost immediately after, George learns that the family is now completely destitute.

Throughout the novel, the townsfolk grow to hate George, and pray that he will get his ‘comeuppance.’  This he receives in spades, losing his family, his home, his fortune, his reputation and his self-respect.  He is relegated to living with, and caring for, his maiden Aunt Fanny and working for a chemical plant.  Worse yet, George loses his hometown, as well.  As auto-manufacturing grows more important, the town grows into a city, and then into a metropolis.  The landmarks of the Gilded Age created by the Ambersons are gently erased by time, leaving the world he knew and his family name little more than a dim memory.

However, in Tarkington’s world, nothing is ever so simple.  While George certainly gets everything he deserves, and then some, we cannot help but feel sorry for him.  His crimes seem to be no more than the arrogance of youth and the stupidity of entitlement.  In fact, in adversity George rises to the occasion handsomely.

More tellingly – and here is where Tarkington loses credibility with Modernists – he makes clear exactly what was lost by a world changing so much.  Though George’s world was class-conscious, insular and snobbish, the new democratic age is chaotic, uncertain and vulgar.  Where George’s world was parochial, self-centered and precious, the modern world hopelessly diffuse, avaricious and filthy.  Tarkington saw it all – the failure of multiculturism, the rubble of our cities, the noise of our “culture,” our obsession with hucksterism and our deluded sense of social mobility.  He knew that the gains were real, but the losses irrevocable and possibly fatal.

The engine of change here, for Tarkington and the town, was the advent of the automobile.  Life got faster, noisier and dirtier.  Yes, opportunities and horizons expanded, but at what cost?

Our recent rereading hit a significant chord because, all too often, we see ourselves as a (hopefully much nicer) later version of George.  Most of the time, I no longer recognize my city, my country or my world.  Here, for example, is George walking around what was once a beautiful, turn-of-the century town:

On Sunday mornings Fanny went to church and George took long walks. He explored the new city, and found it hideous, especially in the early spring, before the leaves of the shade trees were out. Then the town was fagged with the long winter and blacked with the heavier smoke that had been held close to the earth by the smoke-fog it bred. Every-thing was damply streaked with the soot: the walls of the houses, inside and out, the gray curtains at the windows, the windows themselves, the dirty cement and unswept asphalt underfoot, the very sky overhead. Throughout this murky season he continued his explorations, never seeing a face he knew—for, on Sunday, those whom he remembered, or who might remember him, were not apt to be found within the limits of the town, but were congenially occupied with the new outdoor life which had come to be the mode since his boyhood. He and Fanny were pretty thoroughly buried away within the bigness of the city.

One of his Sunday walks, that spring, he made into a sour pilgrimage. It was a misty morning of belated snow slush, and suited him to a perfection of miserableness, as he stood before the great dripping department store which now occupied the big plot of ground where once had stood both the Amberson Hotel and the Amberson Opera House. From there he drifted to the old "Amberson Block," but this was fallen into a back-water; business had stagnated here. The old structure had not been replaced, but a cavernous entryway for trucks had been torn in its front, and upon the cornice, where the old separate metal letters had spelt "Amberson Block," there was a long billboard sign: "Doogan Storage."

To spare himself nothing, he went out National Avenue and saw the piles of slush-covered wreckage where the Mansion and his mother's house had been, and where the Major's ill-fated five "new" houses had stood; for these were down, too, to make room for the great tenement already shaped in unending lines of foundation. But the Fountain of Neptune was gone at last—and George was glad that it was!

He turned away from the devastated site, thinking bitterly that the only Amberson mark still left upon the town was the name of the boulevard—Amberson Boulevard. But he had reckoned without the city council of the new order, and by an unpleasant coincidence, while the thought was still in his mind, his eye fell upon a metal oblong sign upon the lamppost at the corner. There were two of these little signs upon the lamp-post, at an obtuse angle to each other, one to give passers-by the name of National Avenue, the other to acquaint them with Amberson Boulevard. But the one upon which should have been stenciled "Amberson Boulevard" exhibited the words "Tenth Street."

George stared at it hard. Then he walked quickly along the boulevard to the next corner and looked at the little sign there. "Tenth Street."

It had begun to rain, but George stood unheeding, staring at the little sign. "Damn them!" he said finally, and, turning up his coat-collar, plodded back through the soggy streets toward "home."

Our cities, our countries, our very lives are all dynamic things.  They are supposed to change.  But all too often change is heralded as a great and good thing simply because it is a change, because it is new.  We think of what we gain but are seldom very conscious of what we lose.  While most critics and academics embraced writers who sang of the emerging American Century, Tarkington told us all what it would cost.  He was the Poet Laureate of Loss; no wonder his cultural currency is low.

Carel Willink Week at The Jade Sphinx: A View of the Town (1934)

I have only recently become aware of the art of Albert Carel Willink (1900 – 1983), a Dutch artist who worked in a style that he called imaginary realism.  Not all of it is to my taste, to be sure, as it has a decidedly surrealist bent.  However, the imagery is interesting and his technique remarkable.

Willink was born in Amsterdam; his father was an amateur artist who indulged his son’s artistic interests.  The younger Willink at first thought he would make a career in medicine, but in 1918-19 Willink went to the Technische Hogeschool in Delft to study architecture.  He then moved on to Germany, where he tried to get an academic training in a Düsseldorf atelier, but was not admitted.  Later he studied for a short time at the Staatliche Hochschule in Berlin.

It is a tragedy that a painter of Willink’s talent was imprisoned by his particular historical moment.  For artists like Damien Hirst or Andy Warhol, it’s irrelevant that they are talentless, as Modernist expectations are naturally low.  But for a man like Willink who could really paint, it’s depressing to watch him waste his talent on such shallow gamesmanship.

Willink initially marked time with expressionist and abstract painting, but by the mid-1920s he created his own style, imaginary realism.  The best way of thinking about Willink is that he was an artist who could really paint intent on making some of the most inventive dreamscapes of the Twentieth Century – Dali, without the nonsense, pretention and bombast.  He also seemed to be obsessed with beautiful, imposing buildings, and how they scaled against the human form.

Willink died in Amsterdam having lived through all of the significant artistic and historical events of the last century.  Some of his canvases almost seem like an attic filled with mid-century triumphs and anxieties.

Today’s painting, View of the Town, painted in 1934, is by any critical yardstick a masterpiece.  It’s not simply that Willink beautifully rendered the details of the building, the cobblestone street and the wall in the distance, but also that he was able to create an entire mood through the skill of his composition and the technique of his lighting.

The broad expanse of street, with its looming shadows, creates a sense of anxiety and unease.  The absence of people adds to the overall menacing aspect, as does the fact that nothing is visible inside of any of these windows.

A sense of expectation is also created by the approaching storm, which he painted not just in the sky, but with his shades of gray upon the landscape itself.  This muted palette, open composition and feeling of dread anticipation all result in a picture that is beautiful, ethereal and disquieting. 

 

George Paul Leroux, Part I

The more I look at pictures, the more I am delighted, moved and intrigued by what I find.  I’m sure that the name Georges Paul Leroux (1877-1957) is one unfamiliar to many, but his work is alternately beautiful and disturbing.  He is something of a forgotten master, and I suspect that this is a result of the historical moment in which he lived, and his stark, bleak representations of The Great War.

Surely a look at the Academic male nude below demonstrates his mastery of form, his coolly controlled drawing and his sensitivity to light and dark.  However, these qualities became less relevant as the Twentieth Century progressed, and the vapid tropes of Modernism came to the fore.  As Leroux grew older, the fundamental artistic language he spoke was lost.

Leroux was born in Paris, son of Gustav Ferdinand Leroux, a printer of art prints.  Leroux and his brother, Auguste, would study art in Trelly, before serving in the 130 Infantry Regiment, completing his military service in Chartres, where he would regularly draw and paint the cathedral.  It was in Chartres that he met painter Paul Jouve (1978-1973), who became his lifelong friend.

Leroux studied at the national School of Decorative Arts and the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts, later working in the studio of Leon Bonnat (1833-1922).  Leroux painted many slice-of-life pictures of Paris before going to Rome in 1907.  He would grow to love the Italy, and he would return there almost every year to paint the Italian countryside.  On Friday, we will look at his most beautiful Italian picture.

The Great War, however, changed much of his life.  He would marry Mathilde Gabrielle Planquais in Meudon in 1915, and his international travels were curtailed by the War.  It was after the War that Leroux would paint two of his masterful war pictures.

In Eparges, 1915, Leroux depicts the stark horrors of war in a manner less grotesque than Goya, but equally compelling.  The Great War irrevocably changed the notions of warfare in the popular imagination.  The tens of thousands of dead – an entire Lost Generation – erased visions of heroic leaders cleaving through anonymous cannon fodder, the heavens above heralding the victory of God’s chosen.  Rather, greater access to communications, photographs and written first-hand narratives underscored the fact that war involved vast quantities of mud, blood, pain, and dead men.

It is the dead, in fact, that create the focal point of In Eparges, 1915.  Look at the living figures in this fascinating picture.  The living men find the corpse of a comrade, examining his papers to identify him before lowering him into the grave that the others are digging.  But all of these men are anonymous – faces are turned from us, or in shadow.  It is almost as if the living were the ghosts … and the dead man the only animated figure.

The off white the dead man’s shirt and the focus of light on his white head and hands provide the human focal point. His uniform lies crumpled beside him (obviously stripped off by his brother soldiers) – he is no longer a soldier, a figure representing a nation or an ideology, but simply a dead man.  There is no excessive gore or carnage to inspire horror – it is just our stark humanity laid bare.  That, I think, is the root of the picture’s power.

The landscape is dotted with simple, hand-made crosses; the upturned mud littered with burial tools and stones.  The only hint of transcendence, aside from the peaceful look on the dead man’s face, are the faint stars above.  I cannot but help think the dead man looks at the stars, or that the stars look down on him.  Otherwise, the circumstances surrounding the dead man would be too terrible to contemplate.